We got totally battered in the Sunday papers, and Gordon’s interview the next day with Marr was regarded as one of the worst examples of a politician being duplicitous on camera until he topped it again after the election that never was the following year. In subsequent polling, Gordon’s reputation for honesty and integrity had been severely damaged. Nevertheless, however pyrrhic the victory, there was no doubting both the immediate and ultimate effectiveness of the coup.
But the art of the coup goes both ways.
Knowing how to withstand a putsch is just as great a skill as prosecuting one. And – whether through endless practice at the other end of the rifle sights or simply because of his own unprecedented longevity within the Treasury – Gordon proved himself the Charles de Gaulle of Downing Street when it came to surviving assassination attempts.
As the 2006 coup showed, momentum is everything: to succeed, the plotters must keep pushing the leader to the edge of the cliff. And the crucial determinants of that momentum are the media: if they say it’s fizzling out, then that becomes self-fulfilling; if they say one more bad day will make the leader’s position untenable, then it usually will.
But those media judgements are no objective science; they are a collective view formed by the most influential people at different outlets – the editor, political editor and key columnists – based on their conversations with each other and with key players on different sides. That is why, no matter how bad the coverage became during Gordon’s time at No. 10, it was still vital for us to maintain strong and friendly relationships with those key people.
But as well as having that extensive and close set of press relationships, Gordon also had easily the best political intelligence operation of any of his contemporaries, and that too was crucial in terms of his survival. But it didn’t happen by accident.
We would routinely place moles on the ministerial teams of suspect Cabinet ministers and cultivate contacts within their camps. At our different levels – special advisers, backbench MPs, ministers – we would take talkative, sociable types out for drinks or dinner, and test the water by privately venting and exaggerating our own concerns about the future. And above all, we would all keep our eyes and ears constantly open for unusual couplings or hushed conversations.
As a result, when the first major coup attempt came along in September 2008 – a Blairite assault led by John Reid’s diehard rump of supporters – Nick Brown, Gordon’s Chief Whip, was chairing conference calls and going through the ‘secret’ lists and plans of rebels signed up to the plot a full fortnight before they moved into action.
Of course, that kind of intelligence was only of value because we knew exactly what to do with it. Once we knew what was happening, when, and who was involved, the main goal of the Brown team was to make the whole enterprise look shambolic and doomed to fail, thereby shaping the media coverage and putting others off from joining.
At the 2009 local elections, just after my departure, the plan for the coup was for James Purnell to resign, followed by Caroline Flint. Once the crisis point had been reached, David Miliband would also dramatically resign, urging Gordon to step down or face a leadership challenge. So the key to defeating the coup was simply to delay Caroline’s resignation, at which point – when the expected announcement didn’t happen – Miliband got cold feet, and Purnell was left high and dry.
With David Miliband’s various abortive coups, there was a certain crude art to inducing their failure. I was often personally criticised for over-reacting to some new Miliband manoeuvre, unnecessarily ‘ramping it up’ as people would say. But given David’s tendency to treat rebellion like a reluctant bather inching his way into the sea at Skegness, it made sense to shove him right in at the outset, on the grounds that he’d run straight back to his towel and not try again for at least six months.
But if David Miliband’s behaviour was rather easy to predict and influence, there were other Cabinet ministers under Gordon who were much less predictable and were always a concern when attempted coups were in motion: the likes of Alan Johnson, Jack Straw and Alistair Darling, all with the seniority and Cabinet status to do huge damage, even just by remaining silent.
In January 2010, former Cabinet ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt wrote a strange joint letter calling on Gordon to hold a leadership contest to clear the air. To this day, many people feel that they did so with tacit encouragement from their good friends Alistair Darling and Jack Straw, but whether that was true or not, Geoff and Patricia seemed to have no clue as to what to do after they’d published their letter and the supposed coup became something of a media laughing stock. Ed Balls was one of those who took to the airwaves to blast the pair and call for the party to get a grip ahead of the election. Perhaps out of guilt, Darling and Straw both strongly protested to Gordon over the Balls attack.
Once the test of a coup’s momentum becomes the response of key Cabinet ministers, every hour that ticks by without those responses piles pressure on the PM, as it did when Gordon and others were silent during the summer 2006 coup.
So our priority was always to know where each minister was and have a guaranteed way of getting a message through to them. If the response came back that they couldn’t be reached or they were in a meeting, then they were either part of the plot or they were waiting to see how it would unfold. Either way, they were no use. However, if they did respond, we would throw the gauntlet down by telling them they were next up on the TV round at Millbank and dare them to refuse.
At the very least, we always had to put doubt in the mind of a wavering minister or MP: what if Gordon gets through this and I looked disloyal when he asked for help? That pressure increased if all they were seeing on their TV and hearing in the Commons tea rooms was one loyalist after another giving unstinting support to the leader and criticising the plotters, something Blair simply didn’t have in sufficient numbers to get through the 2006 coup unscathed.
However, as Blair found on that occasion and as Gordon found in June 2009, there comes a point when you need to sue for peace in order to save yourself. The only answer then is to negotiate, perhaps not with the plotters directly but with influential Cabinet ministers or party figures, asking them what it will take to settle things down.
With Gordon, it meant drastically revising his planned 2009 reshuffle, most notably keeping Alistair Darling in post, rather than replacing him with Ed Balls, and also accepting that he would change his style of government, his way of running No. 10 and his engagement with MPs.
While the scandal surrounding my sacking clearly didn’t help Gordon’s cause at that time in 2009, it didn’t help either that he shortly afterwards lost one of the other ‘fat men’ he kept around him for protection: Tom Watson, who felt so battered by the attempt by The Sun and others to implicate him in my scandal that he’d removed himself from Westminster and told Gordon he wanted out.
I remember one journalist from The Sun warning me the weekend I was sacked that the paper was going to be giving it to me and Tom both barrels the following day. I said: ‘Look, I’m fair game here, but Tom seriously had nothing to do with it. It’s bonkers everyone dragging him into this.’
He said there was nothing he could do: ‘I’m under orders from the top, mate. Revenge for what he did to Tony in 2006.’ Now you’d think anyone who looked at that 2006 coup would realise that Tom was a dangerous enemy to make, and definitely not someone whose life you’d try to destroy … unless you were sure you could finish the job. They didn’t.
The 2006 coup led to the 2009 Sun onslaught against Tom Watson that led to his retaliatory war on News International over phone-hacking in 2011. And God only knows where that will eventually lead.
34
ASIAN PERSUASION
If Gordon loved America and was inspired by Africa, India and China always made him think.
He was simultaneously gripped by the pace of change in both countries, and their relentless desire to overtake the rest, but hugely perturbed – on an economic,
political and personal level – by the vast inequality on show, feeling there was something not just undemocratic and unfair, but downright unsustainable about the social strata in those countries.
In Africa, when he went to the slums in Kenya or South Africa, that is what the local press wanted to ask him about at their press conferences: what were his impressions; what was he going to do about it? In India, let alone China, his trips to the poorest areas were usually of zero interest to the local media, despite the profound impression they made on him.
This was part of his frustration on our first trip to India in January 2007, when I had to inform him shortly after landing that our agenda, including my carefully worked-out schedule of stories, had been thrown completely out of the window because Jade Goody had made racist comments towards Shilpa Shetty in the Celebrity Big Brother house.
I don’t think Gordon knew where to start asking who or what all those things were, so he went for the catch-all question: ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
This was, after all, a man who, on being told later that year he was going to join Big Brother’s Jermaine Jackson on the Hope Not Hate campaign bus in Glasgow, strolled confidently up to Jermaine’s Afghan wife Halima, shook her hand, and told her how much he loved her music.
I explained everything about Shilpa Shetty and Jade Goody carefully, but he was still baffled about what it had to do with him or our trip. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s turned into a diplomatic crisis between the two countries, it’s the only thing our hacks are interested in, and you’re Johnny-on-the-spot.’
Our travelling press entourage, who’d been working out how they might persuade Gordon to give them a quote on the row, were delighted when I instead presented them with a full statement from Gordon saying we treasured our friendship with India, and when it came to how people should vote in the eviction battle between Shetty and Goody, ‘a vote for Britain is a vote for tolerance’.
I think every one of the hacks – except the poor FT – got a byline on their paper’s splash the following day. It was Cobras all round at the bar that evening and the assistance we gave on that story probably helped us get an easier ride – at least in the English editions – when Gordon committed his ‘supporting the hosts’ gaffe on World Cup 2018 later in the trip.
By contrast, our Indian hosts appeared mortified that the visit had become overshadowed by the Big Brother row, and when a massive press scrum gathered during Gordon’s worthy but indecipherable speech on trade relations in Mumbai, they assured us that they would – with the assistance of the Indian police – hold them back until he had left the building.
As the crowd of cameras and microphones gathered at the bottom of the staircase leading up to the dais, and a small army of police wielding wooden lathis stood above them, you could see trouble coming. So with my Indian counterpart and translator, I went to the top of the steps and said: ‘If you can please make a path for him to go through, Mr Brown will take one question on the Big Brother issue – he only has time for one question – then we must go to the next event.’
There was a murmur of agreement and a parting of the scrum below the staircase – immediately bolstered by the police – but then an almighty row ensued as the journalists tried to agree which of them would ask the question. This was still going on as Gordon finished his speech and went to leave the dais. I ran up to him and said: ‘It’s one question only. Go to the top of the stairs, pick whoever’s shouting loudest, give your Big Brother line, and then we’re out of here.’ Gordon, as ever, did as instructed but for one thing. He picked the only guy with a microphone who wasn’t waving his hand.
‘Me?’ the surprised journalist said. ‘Erm, Mr Brown, erm, what are the chances of a trade deal that India can accept?’ Gordon, delighted at this turn of events, started reeling off a summary of his five-point plan to revive the Doha trade round, while the assorted Indian tabloid and TV journalists began a small-scale riot. I stood in front of Gordon to prevent him going down the stairs and bellowed: ‘One more question!’ Fortunately, this time, it was about Big Brother, Gordon gave a flawless answer and everyone was happy. Except Gordon obviously, who thought I’d screwed the coverage of his trade speech.
The following year, we were back in India and then on to China in 2008 to review preparations for the Beijing Olympics, and talk about UK–China business links. The trip got off to an inauspicious start when Sue Nye, Michael Ellam and I contrived to miss the police motorcade from No. 10 escorting Gordon at rapid pace to Heathrow.
This was very bad news: if Gordon had to spend an hour at the airport waiting for us, we’d hear about it not just for the duration of the flight, but every day afterwards. We managed to persuade the police to slow down so our car could catch up. However, as a consequence, we arrived at Heathrow late, directly under the flight path of BA38 arriving from Beijing, which promptly crash-landed short of the runway.
There were days of speculation as to whether the security system surrounding Gordon’s motorcade had been responsible for some kind of electronic failure on the plane. Until that was ruled out as a cause, Sue, Michael, the cops and I lived in fear, not of the public finding out we’d nearly killed 152 passengers and crew, but of Gordon finding out we’d deliberately slowed down one of his journeys.
That 2008 trip was three years since Gordon’s last visit to China and he was stunned at the speed of transformation even just in that space of time.
It’s a common theme among politicians, journalists and businesspeople. They go to China, see the science-fiction skyline of Shanghai and the vast factory complexes in Shenzhen, then return a short while later and find them all unrecognisable from the last time due to further development. Most people who experience that feel rather overwhelmed and star-struck, as though this is the only future and we must all rush to be part of it.
By contrast, I’d say Gordon was deeply troubled, both because it raised profound questions in his mind about where Britain’s competitive advantage would lie in the decades to come, and also because even then – before the financial crisis – he could see world economic growth becoming so dependent on demand from China that a serious shock there would bring everyone’s house down. That was partly why he was so worried at the potential he saw for social unrest and instability.
In Shenzhen in 2005, when we were taken round a factory manufacturing Sky digi-boxes as an example of British design and Chinese manufacturing working together, Gordon – who was already stunned by the poverty of the satellite towns we had passed en route – became distinctly uneasy about the separation of male and female workers, the apparent youth of many of the females, and – most of all – by the fact that all the workers were effectively tied to their work stations.
To his credit, when he met the local Chinese party chief afterwards, Gordon didn’t duck the issue but made clear that, for all the city’s global success, it was important that all its citizens and workers were able to share in the benefits, and that the improvement of their rights and working conditions needed to be as much a priority as further growth in the years to come.
It was impressive enough that the embassy officials present began whispering heatedly to their Treasury opposite numbers that this was NOT the way you did things in China, although when I observed to them that the party chief and the Chinese officials didn’t seem too put out, they said that Gordon’s interpreter had been diplomatic in what she passed on.
We were back in China in summer 2008 for the close of the Beijing Olympics, with a press entourage who were – to say the least – pleased to get that gig. My duties to them were even more sacred than normal: I had to make sure that, as early as possible each morning, I’d sorted out the stories for the newspapers and evening bulletins so that they could write or record them, file them and then go and enjoy a day watching Olympic events without getting any heat from their news desks.
As an exercise in looking after the entourage, that was probably my finest hour, not least because every night, I was up
until the wee hours with Sumeet Desai from Reuters and the effervescent Jon Craig from Sky, men to whom the concept ‘last orders’ did not exist when ‘on tour’.
We even overcame the biggest press row I ever witnessed, when Pippa Crerar, an Evening Standard reporter who was a one-person entourage for Boris Johnson, asked to sit in on Gordon’s morning press briefing one day. She did so on strict lobby terms – agreed with us all – that she could listen but was not allowed to file anything for that day’s edition back in London.
Gordon did a terrifically engaging and enthused briefing with the top line that, while the independent Honours Committee would have to make their judgements, he would be strongly supportive of a knighthood for Chris Hoy and major honours for other successful competitors. The press loved it, but sure enough, that afternoon, the Standard splash was: ‘Arise, Sir Chris’.
Our hacks went ballistic and, despite Pippa’s protests that it was all an accident, they nearly lynched her. But I gave them some additional quotes from Gordon and did a bit of back-pocket action so at least they had something exclusive for the following day.
On the night of the closing ceremony, almost everyone with a British passport in Beijing gathered in the special ‘London House’ venue set up by the 2012 Games organisers and cheered Boris as he did his flag-waving in the Bird’s Nest stadium.
Gordon approached me on his arrival at London House and said: ‘Boris has got loads of jokes; we need some jokes.’ I told him firmly: ‘No. He’s the star turn. You’ve just got to stand there next to him and enjoy it, just like everyone at home will be enjoying it. Remember, it’s Cameron who’ll be going nuts; it doesn’t matter to you.’ Gordon did exactly that and, for once, people saw him just smiling and laughing naturally as Boris did his ‘wiff-waff’ routine.
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